Gerald Clore

Commonwealth Professor of Psychology

Office Address

Biography

I study emotion, asking questions about what emotions are, how they arise, and what they are for. In general, emotions are emergent affective states that arise when the same kind of goodness or badness is registered at the same time in multiple embodied ways. Our research examines the roles that affective reactions play in cognition and perception, including attention, judgment, memory, and thought. Much of what people do and decide in everyday life depends on what they feel. And in psychology, many of the textbook phenomena in cognitive psychology turn out to have an affective trigger. Additionally, we are interested in the role of emotion in art and other aesthetic experiences.